Some days I am brilliant

Today I had a moment of brilliance!

I adore my MacBookPro. I adore my iPhone. There are a great many things about apple products I like so much more than any of the PCs I have ever own, in desktop or lapbook form. I have had hard drives crash. I have had monitors burn up, literally, and sizzle and pop right before my eyes. I have had many other numerous issues with my PCs in the past. My last laptop was the one that broke the camels back and we decided after much pain and agony of the money-to-get-it-fixed kind that I should “drink the kool-aid” as I was accused and get a MacBook Pro. I had sent that laptop back four times to get the same issue repaired and each time it cost me money and shipping. I gave up and bought the MBP. This was in January of 2009, though the purchase was not made for a bit more than a month. I have never found a PC that did not cost oodles and oodles of money to repair. Again I adore my MBP, but I do know that there are truly only two kinds of computers, those that have crashed and those that are going to.

Apple products do cost a lot more, first born child and an arm a leg more. I thought I was going to hyperventilate after ordering that MacBook Pro and spending that many digits in money on a computer. I was still going to need to replace much of my software with either the Mac version or find new software all together that would serve the same purpose. Thank goodness for that year’s tax refund.

Many [Apple] people congratulated me and gave me advice on the options and the software and even encouragement to buy the Apple Care. At first I did not want to spend another dime on the purchase. After a few stories and some thinking I bought the Apple Care. The Apple Care covers any repairs for three years as long as I did not beat it with a baseball bat or throw it out the window or anything else as unreasonable. If the product fails, they fix it.

Last summer I was having some flickering in my screen display. It is very hard to explain, but this video is about as identical as it can get. I called Apple Support, they very politely worked with me and we did some things we hoped would clear out the video memory and they said if it started doing it again I would need to take my MBP to an Apple Store Genius Bar for a repair, or mail it in. The little tricks she showed me cleaned it up for a while, then it started flickering again. I really wanted to take it to the Apple Store instead of mail it in; I wanted to talk to someone face to face while we looked at the screen misbehaving.

The closest Apple Store is about 2.5-3 hours away, north of Jackson, MS. I decided to wait until a trip we were going to take to Birmingham to visit the g’parents and RevMrKnowTea’s reunion at Samford. The guy I poke with was very kind and decided my MBP needed a few things. It came back to me all healed and better by the end of the next week but not with a new display; they replaced my logic board instead.

Last week, my hard drive crashed. I thought I was going to cry. I mean really cry. I got upset. I got sad. I held it together. Why? How? Because not only do I have the Time Machine (Airport Extreme) scheduled to do a daily backup, but I also have Apple Care. I knew that my hard drive would be replaced for free and I knew I could get everything, or at least most of it back via a restore or a migration to the new hard drive.

New hard drive, restoration went smoothly. Except for one thing. One very big, heart breaking thing. All my photos were saved as well, except one very big, milestone day. February 5th, 2011. Why? I do not know. All the photos after that were there and the ones before it were there, but not that day. That day of all days. My heart was sunk. I sifted through my back ups manually to see if they were there somewhere, hiding. No. Nowhere. After I upload and import photos I delete them from my card. I usually do some manual save to discs on a monthly basis of the really important photos (birthdays, Xmas, Easter, trips, milestones, faves from the month, etc.). But the crash happened on the 18th, I had not done my monthly photos discs yet. The 5th was my second-born’s 13th birthday. I had pics of his first shave and what we have made a big deal about him turning 13, not a teenager, a young man! I wanted those pics.

Today, my brilliance came to a peak, as a last plea of mercy, I prayed, Ohpleaseohpleaseohplease let me have forgotten to delete the images off my card. I pushed the card into the reader and nothing, zero photos. My heart sank. Then I remembered that card always moves deleted photos to a secondary folder until new ones are taken and they replace the old ones. I had not taken new photos with my good camera since the 5th because my battery died and I have misplaced my charger. I opened my file finder window to navigate to the card.

I clicked.